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SearchToday in Islamophobia: Sri Lanka continues to cremate Muslim victims of coronavirus despite widespread condemnation. Twitter blocks ‘dehumanizing’ Chinese Embassy tweet claiming Uighur women are no longer ‘baby-making machines’. Our recommended read today is by Ali Harb on Trump’s now defunct Twitter account, and the President’s misuse of social media to spread Islamophobia. This, and more, below:
United States
Trump's Twitter ban: 10 Islamophobic posts by outgoing president | Recommended Read
Endorsing surveillance of Muslims in New York, Falsely claiming Muslim Americans celebrated 9/11 attacks, Decrying what he called the UK's 'massive Muslim problem', Denying the existence of Muslim-American sports heroes, Retweeting fake videos of violence by 'Muslim migrants', Warning of 'unknown Middle Easterners' at the border, Telling US congresswomen to 'go back' to countries 'they came' from, Accusing Ilhan Omar of dancing on 9/11 anniversary, Saying Biden would turn Midwest into a 'refugee camp.' read the complete article
US Capitol riots: The biggest threat to America is at home
The US Congress recently approved another huge defence bill, vastly overshadowing both the country’s friends and its foes, to ensure unparalleled military and intelligence capabilities around the globe - and yet, sadly, it appears incapable of protecting even the headquarters of its own democracy. The unpreparedness of US law enforcement and intelligence on Wednesday was unbelievable. A full investigation is urgently needed. After Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the events of 6 January mark the third dramatic example in less than a century in which the US has shown such incredible weakness and negligence. Far too alert to external threats, the country is inconceivably blind towards internal ones. It is time to come to terms with an inconvenient truth: the US has always been looking for external enemies - monsters to destroy - to keep at bay its internal ones. Trump’s presidency and his supporters, whether deliberately or not, have finally ripped through this veil of hypocrisy. The US, unfortunately, has always been a violent and polarised society with huge internal social tensions, as exemplified by its turbulent history of slavery, civil war, genocide against native Americans, and civil rights mobilisations in the 1950s and ‘60s. For decades, the many good things the US has provided to humankind’s progress have obscured such original sins. But now the king is naked. A second civil war seems to be looming. read the complete article
The FBI’s Racialized Priorities Endangered Our Democracy
For nearly two decades, the U.S. government has shoveled money into a behemoth national security apparatus. The FBI’s annual budget has ballooned from $3 billion in 1999 to nearly $9 billion today. Much of this 300% increase went to countering terrorism with a mandate to surveil, investigate, and prosecute “homegrown terrorists.” In no uncertain terms, the directive was for the FBI to target Muslim men and Muslim communities. With bipartisan political support and significant resources backing them, FBI agents prey on young, mentally ill, indigent, or otherwise vulnerable Muslim men as targets in government-led sting operations. Before the ubiquity of social media, agents fished for their targets through the surveillance of mosques, cafes frequented by Muslim customers, online chat rooms and Muslim community organizations. Starting in 2006, agents and informants shifted their predatory practices to social media and websites promoting political violence against civilians and Western military forces. Individuals posting content expressing support for ISIS, Al Qaeda, or other extremist groups are targeted in sting operations. read the complete article
Calling the Capitol riot ‘terrorism’ will only hurt communities of color
Our position isn’t that the mob that invaded the Capitol doesn’t fit the various definitions of terrorism. Nor is our position that such incidents are not terrifying — they are. Rather, we argue that our response shouldn’t be so fixated on getting the state to treat these actions as terrorism. Doing so will only backfire: Expanding whom we call terrorists supposes that more law enforcement means more justice or fairness. That is ahistoric. National crises and acts of terrible violence, no matter who perpetrated them, have always been used to justify the expansion of government authority — whether through legislation, budget inflation or the loosening of hard-won civil liberties protections. The powers accumulated by the state in the service of broad-based wars on “terrorism” inevitably get turned on communities of color, even if they ostensibly aimed at White violence at first. In the end, those we serve — Muslim and immigrant communities, as well as social justice movements — will bear the brunt of the results. read the complete article
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka sticks to cremate COVID-19 Muslim victims
Brushing aside pressure from various Muslim countries to stop cremating Muslim bodies, Sri Lanka on Thursday declared that it will continue to cremate all the bodies that have died of COVID-19. Health Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi told the Parliament on Thursday, stressing that the decision was taken in line with the report prepared by the College of Community Physicists of Sri Lanka (CCPSL) last week: “It says in the report that cremation is the safest method for removing the bodies of COVID-19 victims.” read the complete article
China
China praised itself for saving Uyghur women from being “baby-making machines”
The report by the Xinjiang Development Research Center, part of state-run think tank Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, concluded that government policies there had eradicated extremism and “emancipated” the minds of Uyghur women such that they are “no longer baby-making machines,” noted the China Daily piece. The article evidently struck a positive note among Chinese government officials, with the Chinese embassy in the US tweeting out the link and highlighting the research findings regarding Uyghur women’s reproductive health. The line that the Chinese government is promoting is particularly jarring given that researchers and journalists have documented the widespread detentions of Uyghur Muslims since at least 2017 under what the state has called an anti-extremism program. The idea that Uyghur women can freely make reproductive choices in such a scenario is highly questionable—especially weighed against China’s long history of coercive family planning under the one-child policy. But added to that, despite the difficulty of reporting on what’s happening in Xinjang, first-person accounts and official documents suggest the state is forcing stark reproductive choices on Uyghur women. read the complete article
The Chinese government is trying to rebrand forced sterilization as feminism
The full extent of what China is doing to its Uighur population isn’t clear. However, evidence of what some experts have called a form of “demographic genocide” is mounting. An Associated Press investigation last year found that the state of Xinjiang “regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands”. If ethnic minorities have too many children they’re threatened with internment, the AP said. The fact that China is brazenly rebranding demographic genocide as gender equality is outrageous and unconscionable – but not unprecedented. In the 1990s about 350,000 people were sterilized in Peru under a program promoted by President Alberto Fujimori, who argued a lower birth rate was the key to eliminating poverty. “Peruvian women should be the owners of their destiny!” Fujimori said in a 1995 speech to congress. He presented his family-planning campaign as a step forward for feminism, and even got funding from the US Agency for International Development, USAid. Many of the women who were sterilized, however, came from poor indigenous backgrounds and were coerced or forced into the procedure. read the complete article
Twitter blocks 'dehumanizing' Chinese Embassy tweet claiming Uighur women are no longer 'baby-making machines'
The tweet was linked to an article, published by the Chinese Communist Party, that celebrated the decline in birth rates in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of northwestern China. China has been accused of using inhumane birth control practices on Uighur women. Forced abortions, sterilization, and unwanted IUDs are "widespread and systematic" practices, according to the AP. read the complete article
India
No Evidence Against Muslim Man Accused in Forced Conversion Case, UP Tells Allahabad HC
While he accused Nadeem of having an illicit relationship with his wife Parul, it has now emerged that Nadeem had actually helped Parul when she faced domestic violence and ‘mental torture; at home. The woman came out in support of Nadeem and told The Hindu that Nadeem had never tried to convert her. She alleged that her husband had falsely implicated the Muslim labourer because he had supported her when she faced domestic violence and “mental torture” at home. In fact, she alleged that her husband didn’t consult her before filing the FIR. read the complete article
The Trials and Tribulations of Being a Muslim in Today’s India
As the communal divide deepens with every passing day, Muslims in today’s India have a lot to despair about and much more to be afraid of. This article is not about any religion, organisation, political party or government as they are all ephemeral. It is about our people who are enduring. I lament that the venom of hatred has become the lifeblood coursing through the veins of our body politic. The concerted attack on the jewellery-maker Tanishq over something as trivial as a TV ad was a small symptom of the ‘othering’ in which, not to speak of maintaining any sort of relations, they would like the Muslims to vanish out of mind and out of sight. When the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws banned marriages with Jews, their objective was to maintain ‘racial purity’. Their categorisation of Jews as sub-humans (Untermensch) was based on race, not religion. In today’s India, through the anti-conversion laws, they are making religion the basis of criminalisation. read the complete article